by Maggie Ford
He suddenly, vaguely, remembered Dick Bryant’s words as he told him to sod off. What was it? Pam in labour? Didn’t look good?
It had to be something bad to make Dick Bryant come here seeking Dad. Why hadn’t they been alerted to the closeness of the birth sooner than this? But, of course, Pam has been slung out, hadn’t she? Stupid attitude to take. He, Connie and Josie still went occasionally to see her to show that they had no axe to grind. The last time he’d seen her had been three weeks ago. She had seemed all right then if a bit like an elephant around the middle, waddling about the little flat she and her husband rented. He’d spoken of it to Mum but she’d gone quiet, had changed the subject. But she should have known when Pam was due. Even if she chose to ignore it, word should have been got to her prior to this. He found himself blaming Pam’s in-laws, the Bryants. Easy to blame someone else. And George her husband too – a letter at least would have been decent of him if he hadn’t the gumption to come round in person.
Danny returned his attention to Dad. He’d opened his eyes again, but his legs lay as they had been when he had been placed down on the ground. And when Danny reassured him, ‘You’re gonna be all right, Dad,’ he merely turned his head towards him with a wan smile and closed his eyes again in a sort of waiting, as they all waited, milling around unsure what to do. Once he spoke, as though to himself.
‘Bloody Bryant – wants to see me in me grave, do he? And then he’ll dance on it? Ain’t goin’ter give ’im no chance o’ that. I’ll see ’im there first.’
Otherwise he said little else, not even when Danny said, ‘He came to say Pam’s having her baby and that she ain’t doing too good havin’ it, Dad.’
Pam knew little of the birth, waking up in hospital, confused and woozy from anaesthetic. After the dim light of the room in which she had begun labour white light dazzled her, bleary though she felt as she opened her eyes to three hazy faces gazing down at her.
One was that of a nurse, distinguished by her cap and white clothing. Pam’s eyes, focusing within seconds, picked out first her mother-in-law, then her husband. She came fully awake, realising with a start where she was.
‘George.’ She tried to rise but her stomach hurt so across the middle, like something pulling at the skin, stretching it with a pricking sensation that wasn’t pleasant. She lay back weakly. ‘Oh, George. How’d I get here?’
She realised that his hand was holding hers. ‘The doctor had to send for an ambulance. You couldn’t get the baby out.’
‘Oh, no!’ She realised the worst now. She’d lost the baby. They’d had to take her to hospital because she had been so weak, near to dying herself. It had felt like it, no strength left in her even to scream from the pain of trying to deliver it. She recalled vaguely hearing the doctor saying, ‘She hasn’t a chance of delivering it … growing too weak …’
She had known little after that, except for a feeling of floating, hands bearing her along, downwards, of swinging about, of lying on something hard and being swayed from side to side, strange faces looking at her, bright lights, then nothing.
She felt wretched, empty, destroyed. ‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry. I lost it.’
‘The baby?’ He was smiling down at her. ‘Turn your head a bit. This way. Take a look.’
Doing as she was told, she saw the crib by the bed, so close she could have reached out and touched it had she the strength and the stitches not pulled. She realised now that the pulling meant stitches. From her angle, though she was propped up by pillows, she couldn’t see properly into the crib but she saw the mound within it, a cosy little mound that moved from time to time.
‘It’s a girl, Pam. We’ve got a baby daughter.’ George’s voice was in danger of breaking. She thought he was near to tears. ‘She’s doing all right, Pam, and so are you. Mother and daughter doing fine.’
‘It was a breech,’ Mrs Bryant’s voice cut in sharply, but her son took no notice of the interruption.
‘The doctor couldn’t turn her so he sent for the ambulance. They did a … Caesari … thing section, they called it – opened up your tummy and got the baby out that way. Isn’t it wonderful what they can do? They said you’d never’ve brought her into the world on your own. But she’s perfect. They say she weighs eight pounds twelve ounces. They said it’s very big for a girl. I think she’s a-goin’ter be tall, like you. Well made, like your dad.’
He had been gabbling, now he paused. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t get any of your family here.’
Pam had been regarding the bundle in the crib all this time. Now she lay back on the pillows, staring at the walls, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I didn’t expect them to come. They don’t want anything to do with me, not even interested in their own grandchild, their very first grandchild. I’ll never forgive them. I don’t care if I never see them again.’
George said something to the nurse who said something back and he turned to Pam, quickly interrupting her. ‘The nurse says you can hold your baby if you want. So long as you’re careful. The stitches, y’know.’
Wordlessly, wrapped in her own misery about her uncaring family, Pam nodded, had the bundle laid gently in her arms by the hovering nurse who folded back the hospital shawl from the tiny screwed up red face with such tenderness it might have been her own child.
‘There you are, dear. Isn’t she beautiful?’
Pam tilted her head, drawing in her chin to look down at her new daughter. Red-faced she might be; grimacing she might be, the little mouth already seeking nourishment, the eyes alternately opening to slits and screwing tight shut again, the head being turned this way and that, but the nurse was right, she was beautiful. Pam saw Connie in the tiny, working face. If she grew up like Connie she would be beautiful indeed. She looked a bit like Annie too. But then they were sisters, her new baby’s aunts.
Perhaps it was anaesthetic that made her so, but she thought of Connie and of Annie – Connie, the man she’d so loved taken from her and Annie thousands of miles away, maybe never to come home again – and she let herself dissolve into weeping, her head bent over her child who would never be visited by her parents, its grandparents, as if the child too must be blamed for her mother’s actions, just as they had all been expected to take up their father’s feud with a man who had wronged him long before they were born. At that moment she hated her parents as she had never hated anyone before.
‘They wouldn’t come even when I was in danger,’ she sobbed against the baby’s head, its warmth penetrating the flesh of her wet cheek. ‘Not even my own mother.’
George was gripping her hand as it lay over the baby. ‘They couldn’t,’ he whispered. Something happened that stopped them. There was an accident.’
Mrs Bryant’s voice cut through his whisper like a sharp knife through butter. ‘Your father had an accident. All because he can’t abide my husband. The man’s eaten up with enmity against us. He’ll never see it wasn’t planned. He don’t want to see. In my opinion he deserves all he …’
‘Mum!’ George said, the terse command shutting her up.
He turned back to Pam, who suddenly felt bewildered and alarmed. His hand tightened its grip on hers as she cried out, ‘What’s happened? What’s wrong? What d’you mean, accident?’
‘You dad had a bit of fall. I don’t think it’s bad but they did take him to hospital – this hospital.’
While Pam cuddled her baby ever closer to her, concern for her father growing steadily, he told her all that his father had told him of the incident; how he’d gone to fetch her mother but had not found her in, so seeing the cockle bawleys coming in on the tide had gone to the sheds to meet her father; how he, furious at seeing Bryant there, had slipped, the laden baskets of shellfish making him fall awkwardly.
‘Dad said he didn’t know what to do,’ George went on. ‘He just backed off while they carried your dad to the shore and an ambulance came to take him to the hospital. Your family is here, but round your dad’s bed.’
‘What’s he done to hims
elf?’ Pam’s question was hardly a whisper.
‘While you were asleep I went over to find out. I didn’t go into the ward, didn’t want to start another row. But I explained the situation to the ward sister and she said you’re not to worry, your dad’s not in any danger. Except that is … well, he’s injured his back. They didn’t tell me how bad it was, but at the moment he can’t move his legs.’ Trying to lessen the blow for her, he hurried on. ‘It’s probably just temporary until they sort him out. But as I wasn’t immediate family, so they said, even though I explained about you, they wouldn’t tell me any more. But you’re not to worry, darling.’ Pam was crying. ‘He’ll be all right’
‘I want my mum,’ she sobbed, getting steadily more distraught.
George gave his mother a despairing glance and she hurried off in search of a nurse to help calm the girl.
‘Where is her mother?’ the nurse asked in surprise and frowned when told the situation. ‘It doesn’t matter what ill feelings there are,’ she said briskly. ‘This girl has just had a Caesarean section. She is worn out by a prolonged labour. She needs her mother. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances.’ She turned towards George; ‘You say her father’s injuries are not life-threatening, so for your wife’s sake, go and find her mother. She need only stay a few minutes to comfort her. Tell her she is needed here. It is her duty to be here with her daughter.’
Ten minutes later Pam and her mother were holding each other in an embrace that could only speak of long lonely months of separation and the secret pain that had gone with it, each woman weeping quietly upon the other’s shoulder as the past for the moment was put aside.
‘Will you tell Dad?’ Pam asked quietly as they moved apart, the other two people by the bed momentarily forgotten. ‘About you coming here to see me?’ She had already been informed that her father knew nothing of her mother’s presence here. Mum had slipped away while the doctors were attending to her father, after hearing that his immediate condition wasn’t as much a concern as his long-term condition might prove to be. She’d come to Pam’s bedside already upset by Dad’s accident and what might lie ahead of him, of them all. It had only taken her daughter’s pale, wan face to send her weeping into her arms.
Now, having dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, she put it away in her handbag with an excessive amount of concentration on what she was doing, using that action as a shield against her reply.
‘I don’t think so, dear. Not yet.’
‘He’ll never forgive me, will he?’
‘It’s not that, dear. He’s too ill at the moment to be bothered with other things. We’ve enough on our plate.’
There was silence between them, each alone with her own thoughts while George and his mother, relegated to a place far outside this reformed bond, stood back as spectators only. George gave his mother a warning look at the slightest sign of her making to interfere.
Pam watched her mother turn her attention to the baby, who had been put back in her crib. Peggy kept her eyes concentrated on the flexing bundle. ‘What’re you going to call her?’
There had been so many names passed back and forth between Pam and George during the pregnancy, a dozen boys’ names and as many girls’, she and George laughing over some of them while over others they had nodded, almost agreed, coming to a decision until dropping them for something that seemed even better. But now, Pam looked with tear-moistened eyes at her mother and said simply: ‘Elizabeth. We’ll call her Peggy.’
She saw her mother’s eyes begin to glisten, her own too prickling afresh. She saw George’s face split into a grin of agreement while behind him Mrs Bryant sniffed her plain disapproval of this sudden unequivocal reunion between a mother and daughter for so long estranged by the feud between the two families.
Josie had written another, sad, letter to Arthur Monk. Sad in two ways, because of the thought that Dad might never walk again, and because Arthur, expecting to see her yesterday, would have felt stood up. There had been no way to tell him on a Sunday and until her letter arrived today explaining what had happened, he would still be feeling angry and let down. She just hoped he’d understand.
She wasn’t being unfeeling about Dad’s accident. She was as worried as any of them. She loved Dad. Could not visualise him stuck in a wheelchair at the mercy of other people’s dictates, unable to work any more, only half the man he had been. It made her cry every time she thought of how the doctor had taken Mum into a side office to speak to her at length.
She, Danny and Connie had stood outside, Close together as though needing protection from some exterior force beyond their control. Through the window they had watched the man’s lips moving, his head held at an earnest sort of angle towards Mum. Time and time again she had nodded. She’d had a handkerchief to her lips but she didn’t seem to have been crying.
When Mum came out she had walked slowly from the ward and down the green and cream painted corridor. They all followed, not knowing how to ask what the surgeon had said, sensing it too dire for her to tell them until she could keep her voice steady. A few yards along she’d stopped, allowing them to gather around her. Then she had spoken in a quiet controlled voice.
‘It seems your dad won’t be able to work, ever again. In fact …’ she had paused and taken an easier tack. ‘The doctor’s told me they can’t do anything for his back. I don’t understand all he said. Bit over my head, I suppose. But we’ve got some hard times ahead of us with your dad. He said something about an upper lumbar spine what’s been injured – something about a complete something-or-the-other of the spinal cord that they can’t do anything about. They’re watching him in case he develops some sort of bladder infection which’d be serious, so he’s not out of the woods yet. But I’m afraid your dad’s legs’ll be paralysed for always. I’m going to have be with him everywhere, lift him about, get him in and out of a wheelchair and into bed, though he might be able to do that much for himself in time, and dress himself and that. It all depends on his strength of will, the doctor said, and your dad’s got a lot of that.’
They had all listened in silence. Once or twice Danny had said he would always be there to help her with him, and Connie had nodded that she too would be there, and Josie herself had joined in the general encouragement, at the time firm about her own role in all this.
But after two weeks, doubts had set in. The bladder infection, though held at bay, was still the hospital’s prime concern. They said it would take about six to eight weeks for him to have some sort of control over it. Meantime, he lay humiliated by the tube that ran from him into a bottle, a strong man brought low and belittled. The hospital had promised that in eight weeks he would be given a wheelchair; they spoke about his being sent home after that, that Mum should arrange for him to sleep on a sawdust bed which would give him support – they would explain to her later what this comprised, and of course he would have to sleep downstairs, no hope of him ever going upstairs again. They asked her if she could cope. Mum had lifted her chin and said yes she could, thank you very much. They had told her that in about three months things would be quite reasonable with him and he might even manage getting himself from the chair into his bed and out again, and one day even try to get around on crutches, again depending upon his willpower.
Meantime, morose and sullen, speaking little, he was aware without being told what his future would be. Josie wondered about all their futures. How would they live with him not working? They couldn’t ask his brothers to keep them even though the Steadfast was jointly owned by the three of them. Obviously they would help, being family, but it would be like charity. Danny of course would become the breadwinner now, no question about it. He had already spoken of it, though out of Dad’s hearing, had taken it as expected of him.
She posted her letter to Arthur and for the rest of the week waited for his answer. It didn’t come until Thursday. Three wretched days during which she slowly came to realise that she was in love with Arthur – really in love. Going to work while she wai
ted, the waiting made worse by not knowing if he would even reply, was misery, the most miserable three days of her life.
Each evening after work she visited Dad along with Mum. Sometimes Connie and Danny came, and sometimes Danny with Lily. Afterwards, she and Mum and Connie would pop along for a brief look in at Pam who was due to leave in a day or two. Her stitches had come out, and she was walking about the ward nursing her baby. Dad knew nothing of these calls. ‘Best not to upset him,’ Mum said.
He was obviously worrying deep inside about the future though he said little to anyone except Mum, and whatever he said to her she didn’t divulge. It made visiting hours uncomfortable, as he remained silent while they tried to find something to talk about. There were long silences when Josie wished she could see Arthur, that things had been different.
She felt heartless thinking more of herself than Dad when the doctor in charge of his case spoke words they couldn’t comprehend about the future: words that were supposed to cheer but rang only dire.
How could she think of spending time seeing Arthur while Dad was in this plight? Yet waiting for the letter that never seemed to come, she was falling more and more in love with Arthur.
On Thursday the letter she waited for arrived. Ripping it open Josie read the short note:
Dear Jo. Ever so sorry to here about your dad’s acident. Shame we didnt meet on Sunday. I wated a long time but you never turned up and I went home. I wos upset but I understand why you didnt come. Hope your dads alrite. please rite and tell me. I still want to see you and hope we can meet soon. I miss you. I wuld like to see you everso much, can we make a date Sunday after next same place same time. Looking forwood to seeing you again. Sorry, I aint much of a writer. love. Arthur.
At least he’d spelled his name correctly. Josie clutched the letter to her bosom in an ecstasy of delight and forgave him, even loved him for his hopeless spelling. It made him dear to her. She could hardly wait to put pen to paper, send her reply flying off to him as quick as the post office could get it there. And she could hardly wait to see him again. This time even hell freezing over wasn’t going to stop her.